Pow, I got illuminated!
Soul Coughing’s three albums track a very clear path of normalization. From their beginnings as an experimental toy instrument and samples jazz and poetry trio out of John Zorn’s Knitting Factory, they released their brilliant and thoroughly individualist debut Ruby Vroom, then with their more hip-hop and rock influenced follow-up Irresistible Bliss they smoothed things out more (although it was still quite odd) and finally with this album, they had become a fairly normal alternative rock band, and with “Circles” they even scored a hit single, and the band subsequently broke up.
I do not want to insinuate for even a moment that this is not a good album, it’s a charming and well-rendered rock album with a notable hip-hop influence, it is just much more normal than the two albums that preceded it. This is not to say it is outright normal – the lyrics are still largely opaque and frequently of an improvisational nature. “Rolling” seems to be along the same lines as Irresistible Bliss’ “Super Bon Bon” of M. Doughty experimenting with hip-hop flow in an alt-rock song, and one can hardly imagine anyone else capping a song with ‘Roller boogie, motherfucker!’ Doughty has a way with metaphorical imagery and on “Pensacola” he describes a trip to Wal-Mart to buy self-esteem – ‘And by the lawnchairs there, next to the racks of guns, your self-esteem is waiting, canned up in aluminum.’ “Monster Man” is the noisiest, most discordant moment, recalling their previous work, based around a hunched, twisted organ part, with Doughty reeling off ‘a hand came down and POW I got illuminated!’
The album’s highpoint is the throbbing, wicked “St. Louise Is Listening” although “Houston” with its rollerskating junkie whore story comes close. The smoother sound makes Doughty’s voice and lyrics meld better with the rest of the band, with Yuval Gabay’s wicked jungle-styled (one of the album’s producers was DJ Optical, Goldie’s producer) rhythms pushing the best songs into overdrive in curious interaction with fractured guitar parts and stormy stand-up bass.
A strong close-out to a phenomenal, if brief, career. One of the great, unique bands of the nineties, the ultimate arch-postmodernists.
79% => ****
Check out the awesome Cartoon Network Groovies videos for “Rollin” and “Circles”
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